Marketing 101: What is link juice?

Link juice is a valuable commodity in the search engine optimization world — and it doesn’t come easy. It’s a strategy game that gets more out of less and rewards marketers who prioritize value.

For the uninitiated, link juice is marketing jargon that is used to explain the power (i.e., relevance) that external links can give to another webpage. Based on various factors, the amount of “juice” your website gets from an external link can be a little or a lot.

According to the almighty Google, the search engine’s algorithm determines which pages have the best information for a query on a subject, mostly by other prominent websites linking to the page.

Basically, link juice is a quality, not a quantity game.

The more high quality pages that link back to your page, the juicier it will be — which translates into a higher ranking on Google.

A page is considered high quality if it meets the following criteria: indexable by search engines, swimming in link juice itself, independent or unpaid, has linked to you and only five others (not five hundred), and, lastly, the link has relevant, keyword-optimized anchor text.

How can I get more link juice for my website?

In the game of link juice, either you win — or you die.

Not really, but it can be extremely helpful to marketers. It takes a lot of work to get going from marketing, PR and content — but once it’s chugging along, it should evolve into more of a maintenance process.

Obviously, the best way to attract more links to your website is to create compelling, engaging and trustworthy content.

Once you have that, promote it. Push it on social media — particularly LinkedIn and Twitter, but it may vary based on your industry. With quality content in your portfolio, you can contribute to other sites for a linkback, or invite a guest blogger onto your site for the same exchange.

Look out for opportunities online where your content could be listed as a thought leader, or your product could be used for a product review. Make the sources as independent as possible — news articles, blog posts, magazine articles, forums and ratings sites like Yelp or Amazon.

Also, make sure to spread the link love around. It’s important that you don’t have one page heavily weighted with links while the rest of your pages are barren. Go deeper than just promoting your main page.

Although building link juice doesn’t exactly lead to increased sales, the more positive link juice your website has, the higher it will rank on Google — and you will see more organic traffic.

With a focus on aspirational, customer-first marketing, Courtney’s goal has been to produce clear, interesting and actionable external content for MarketingSherpa readers. This has included writing over 300 case studies, moderating live event interviews, and producing video content. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in English Literature, Mass Communications and Film Studies from Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Ind., and was a correspondent for USA Today College prior to joining MECLABS Institute.